


The Secrets of Seaton Hall

by MaloryArcher



Series: #ClexaWeek2017 [2]
Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: #ClexaWeek2017, Alternate Universe - After College/University, Alternate Universe - College/University, Dorms, F/F, Fluff, Roommates, Rumors
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-01
Updated: 2017-03-01
Packaged: 2018-09-27 14:11:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,500
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10024217
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MaloryArcher/pseuds/MaloryArcher
Summary: The students of Seaton Hall can't help but wonder if there's any truth to the rumors about a couple of administrators who happen to have been roommates, years ago, on the second floor.Day Two of #ClexaWeek2017





	

**Author's Note:**

> Again, quickly written, and barely edited (but super fun to write).

There are a handful of open secrets known by nearly every resident in Seaton Hall. Everybody knows that the West door never really closes in the winter; the metal parts get frozen, and the wood refuses to yield without maximum effort, and, by the time finals week rolls around, keeping it cracked seems good enough. Almost everyone knows that the rec room furniture in the basement gets heat treated for bedbugs once a year, and that it never seems to work. Everyone but the freshmen class knows that there are prohibition-style panels on the insides of odd-numbered dorm room closets.

Most of the boys, and a few of the girls, know that the urinals on the fifth floor always flush bright blue-water, even though they aren’t cleaned any more or less often than the toilets. Most of the girls, and a few of the boys, know that the tampon dispenser actually releases chocolates, and that, if you need a tampon, there’s a stash of free ones hidden, and frequently restocked, in the little compartment above the toilet paper dispenser.

After two hundred years of history, two hundred years of prank wars and movie nights and study sessions and prohibited open-coil toaster oven incidents, lots of the secrets of Seaton Hall are out, if not to every resident, then to most.

But the most contentious piece of information in Seaton Hall, the one thing that’s been heatedly debated as fact or fiction, depending on the day, is whether or not the Dean of Students and the Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs ever hooked up when they were sophomore roommates on the second floor.

 

“The Vice Chancellor will see you now, Dr. Forrest,” the receptionist says, just like always. Lexa likes her. She’s an international student, one of the few from the burgeoning partnership between this university and a smaller one in Oman, and she doesn’t gawk at Lexa every time she waits in one of the overstuffed chairs outside of Clarke’s office like the other students do.

Being Dean of Students means working closely with student representatives, and working closely with student representatives means Lexa is well aware of the _curiosity_ some of the young people on campus have about the nature of her relationship with Dr. Griffin.

She’s always grateful to make an acquaintance who doesn’t put that curiosity on display.

“Thank you, Khetan,” Lexa says, opening the heavy wooden door to Clarke’s office and shutting it gently behind her. She puts her briefcase on the floor and waits to be greeted.

Clarke is working behind her desk, a broad, stately wenge antique that hasn’t left the office in at least forty years; she still sometimes says it makes her feel more grown-up, as though the wisps of gray hair and the regular backaches and the mortgage aren’t enough. Her pen moves furiously in her hand, and Lexa just has to watch her for a second. It really hasn’t been long since they were kids, learning the ins and outs of this sprawling campus together. Now, they’re running it.

Clarke’s so lost in thought that Lexa thinks she must have forgotten about her until she reaches out absent-mindedly for her desk phone, and Lexa knows she’s about to ask Khetan to send Lexa in, as though she hadn’t already.

“You work too hard,” Lexa says quietly, “do you know that?”

Clarke looks up without pausing her pen, flashes the smile that hasn’t changed since they met, even if the lines around her mouth and eyes are more pronounced, and then looks back down.

“You’re one to talk, Professor.”

There’s a reason that, at thirty-nine and forty years old, respectively, they’re the youngest Vice Chancellor and Dean of Students in university history. They both took the place by storm, finishing undergrad with honors. They both took on the feat that is graduate school. They both spent a few years teaching at other universities, but somehow couldn’t fight the gravitational pull of this one. They both work entirely too hard.

“Take a break with me?”

“Only if we’re not going back to the White Rabbit,” Clarke says, cringing at just the thought of the bar just off-campus that was once a favorite haunt of faculty members looking to blow off a little steam, but has been taken over by the barely legal students that they love, but would rather not socialize with.

“Are you saying you don’t want the barely legal juniors to offer to buy us shots? Because I’m pretty sure you told me once to euthanize you when you stopped accepting free shots,” Lexa says, dropping onto the edge of the desk. Clarke says she hates it when Lexa does that, but Lexa thinks otherwise, since the blonde usually just arches an eyebrow, smirks, and shakes her head at her.

“I believe _you_ once told _me_ to euthanize you if you ever gave up your ritual of shot-gunning a beer before all your big writing projects, but I let you live through grad school.”

“True,” says, “I guess I’ll have to let you live. I don’t have to like it, though,” Lexa shrugs, casually dodging the ball point pen that Clarke throws at her.

“You love it.”

“I love the cheese fries at Costia’s, Dr. Griffin, and to imply anything else would only fuel student rumors.”

“Please,” Clarke laughs, “if I say ‘bless you’ after you sneeze, the rumor mill records it.”

The blonde starts shuffling through her papers, looking at each side and organizing them into a stack.

“Were we any better when we were kids,” Lexa asks, even though she knows they weren’t.

“We were us,” Clarke says, “it made all the difference.”

 

 

Clarke tells Khetan to head out early, since she’s taking a long lunch and then working from home for the rest of the evening, and packs the necessary papers into her satchel. It doesn’t take them long to get to Costia’s, especially since Clarke’s office is in the center of campus.

The place has barely changed since they were teenagers. It’s still a small, oddly placed tiki hut inside the student union. There’s nothing tropical about it, no theme-heavy names or little umbrellas, just a standalone hut with a roof made of fake straw and the best burgers and cheese fries in a five-mile radius.

They take their food to go, opting to find somewhere to sit outside in the sun. Somehow, by accident, or very purposeful trolling, Lexa guides them to the courtyard across from Seaton Hall.

She and Clarke find a couple patio chairs and snatch them up before they can be claimed. Lexa meticulously rolls up the sleeves of her button-down. Clarke slips her blazer off her shoulders and tosses it over her bag on the ground. Lexa stretches a long leg out to rest on the seat of Clarke’s chair. Just because they’re administrators doesn’t mean they have to take themselves too seriously.

Students pass them by, some of them waving or stopping to say hi, most of them offering up weakly hidden sideways glances. Clarke and Lexa eat their fries and remember what it felt like to be those wide-eyed kids.

“I don’t want to be gross and sentimental,” Lexa says, when they’re both still laughing about the time when Raven Reyes hid in the crawl space in her closet a couple hours a day just to convince her roommate that the hall was haunted, “but it’s been twenty years since the first time we got cheese fries at Costia’s and sat out here to eat them.”

Clarke grins at her and says, “I think you mean twenty years since _I_ got cheese fries and you ate half of them.”

Lexa rolls her eyes.

“Twenty years since you offered to share with me, then.”

“It’s been the best twenty years of my life,” Clarke admits, “Even if you are gross and sentimental in your old age.”

“Even the grad school years?”

“Even the grad school years.”

Lexa smiles, because grad school was a headache and a half, or it would’ve been, without Clarke.

“Remember Seaton 225,” Lexa asks.

“I barely remember anything else,” Clarke says, and they smile fondly at each other, at the people they’ve grown into. It’s about as close to a public display of affection as they get on campus when they aren’t behind a locked office door. 

The faculty and staff all know, of course, since they’re married with a house, an old, ill-mannered cat, and two high-school aged children. As do the students who get invited to their annual end of the school year barbecue, and the ones with sense enough to just Google them, or even check the active directory.

And as for whether or not they’ve been together since Seaton 225, well, that’s one secret that students in the hall might never reveal. Unless, of course, they look inside the prohibition-era panel in the room, shine a light, and see the words _Lexa Forrest loves Clarke Griffin and cheese fries, in that order_.


End file.
